Earth in Upheaval Page 3

  There are erratic boulders in many places of the world. In the British Isles, on the shore and in the highlands, are enormous quantities of them, transported there across the North Sea from the mountains of Norway. Some force wrested them from those massifs, bore them over the entire expanse that separates Scandinavia from the British Isles, and set them down on the coast and on the hills. From Scandinavia boulders were also carried to Germany and spread over that country, in some places so thickly that it seems as though they had been brought there by masons to build cities. Also, high in the Harz Mountains, in central Germany, lie stones that originated in Norway.

  From Finland blocks of stone were swept to the Baltic regions and over Poland and lifted onto the Carpathians. Another train of boulders was fanned out from Finland, over the Valdai Hills, over the site of Moscow, and as far as the Don.

  In North America erratic blocks, broken from the granite of Canada and Labrador, were spread over Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio; they perch on top of ridges and lie on slopes and deep in the valleys. They lie on the coastal plain and on the White Mountains and the Berkshires, sometimes in an unbroken chain; in the Pocono Mountains they balance precariously on the edge of crests. The attentive traveler through the woods wonders at the size of these rocks, brought there and abandoned sometime in the past, frighteningly piled up.

  Some erratics are enormous. The block near Conway, New Hampshire, is 90 by 40 by 38 feet and weighs about 10,000 tons, the load of a large cargo ship. Equally large is Mohegan Rock, which towers over the town of Montville, in Connecticut. The great flat erratic in Warren County, Ohio, weighs approximately 13,500 tons and covers three quarters of an acre; the Ototoks erratic, thirty miles south of Calgary, Alberta, consists of two pieces of quartzite “derived from at least 50 miles to the west,” of a calculated weight of over 18,000 tons.2 Blocks of 250 to 300 feet in circumference, however, are small when compared with a mass of chalk stone near Malmo in southern Sweden, which is “three miles long, one thousand feet wide and from one hundred to two hundred feet in thickness, and which has been transported an indefinite distance. ...” It is quarried for commercial purposes. A similar transported slab of chalk is found on the eastern coast of England, “upon which a village had unwittingly been built.”3

  In innumerable places on the surface of the earth, as well as on isolated islands in the Atlantic and Pacific and in Antarctica,4 lie rocks of foreign origin, brought from afar by some great force. Broken off from their parent mountain ridges and coastal cliffs, they were carried down dale and up hill and over land and sea.

  Sea and Land Changed Places

  The most renowned naturalist to come from the generation of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was Georges Cuvier. He was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the science of fossil bones, and thus of the science of extinct animals. Studying the finds made in the gypsum formation of Montmartre in Paris and those elsewhere in France and the European continent in general, he came to the conclusion that in the midst of even the oldest strata of marine formations there are other strata replete with animal or plant remains of terrestrial or fresh-water forms; and that among the more recent strata, or those that are nearer the surface, there are also land animals buried under heaps of marine sediment. “It has frequently happened that lands which have been laid dry, have been again covered by the waters, in consequence either of their being engulfed in the abyss, or of the sea having merely risen over them. ... These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proven, with regard to the last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day.”5

  “The breaking to pieces, the raising up and overturning of the older strata [of the earth], leave no doubt upon the mind that they have been reduced to the state in which we now see them, by the action of sudden and violent causes; and even the force of the motions excited in the mass of waters, is still attested by the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are in many places interposed between the solid strata. Life, therefore, has often been disturbed on this earth by terrific events. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some, which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed up by inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid dry, the bottom of the sea having been suddenly raised; their very races have been extinguished for ever, and have left no other memorial of their existence than some fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”6

  Cuvier was surprised to find that “life has not always existed upon the globe,” for there are deep strata which contain no vestiges of living beings. The sea without inhabitants “would seem to have prepared materials for the mollusca and zoophytes,” and when they appeared and populated the sea, they deposited their shells and built coral, at first in small numbers, and eventually in vast formations.

  Cuvier believed that changes have operated in nature not just since the appearance of life, for the land masses formed previous to that event also seemed to have experienced violent displacements.7

  He found in the gypsum deposits in the suburbs of Paris marine limestone containing over eight hundred species of shells, all of them marine. Under this limestone there is another – fresh-water – deposit formed of clay. Among the shells, all of fresh-water (or land) origin, there are also bones – but “what is remarkable,” the bones are those of reptiles and not of mammals, “of crocodiles and tortoises.”

  Much of France was once sea; then it was land, populated by land reptiles; then it became sea again and was populated by marine animals; then it was land again, inhabited by mammals; then it was once more sea, and again land. Each stratum contains the evidence of its age in the bones and shells of the animals that lived and propagated there at the time and were entombed in recurrent upheavals. And as it was on the site of Paris, so it was in other parts of France, and in other countries of Europe.

  The strata of the earth disclose that “The thread of operations is here broken; the march of Nature is changed; and none of the agents which she now employs, would have been sufficient for the production of her ancient works.”8

  “We have no evidence that the sea can now incrust those shells with a paste as compact as that of the marbles, the sandstones, or even the coarse limestone ... .

  “In short, all [now active] causes united, would not change, in an appreciable degree, the level of the sea; nor raise a single stratum above its surface. ... It has been asserted that the sea has undergone a general diminishing of level. ... Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported solid matter in all directions; that the temperature of the globe is either diminishing or increasing; none of these cases could have overturned our strata, enveloped in ice large animals, with their flesh and skin; laid dry marine [animals] ... and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire genera.”9

  “Thus, we repeat, it is in vain that we search, among the powers which now act at the surface of the earth, for causes sufficient to produce the revolutions and catastrophes, the traces of which are exhibited by its crust.”10

  But what could have caused these catastrophes? Cuvier reviewed the theories of the origin of the world current in his time but found no answer to the question that preoccupied him. He did not know the cause of these vast cataclysms; he only knew that they had occurred. “Many fruitless efforts” had been made, and he felt that his search for the causes of the cataclysms was fruitless too. “These ideas have haunted, I may almost say have tormented me during my researches among fossil bones.”11

  The Caves of England

  In 1823, William Buckland, professor of geology at the University of Oxford, published his Reliquiae d
iluvianae (Relics of the Flood), with the subtitle, »Observations on the organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel, and on other geological phenomena, attesting the action of an universal deluge«. Buckland was one of the great authorities on geology of the first half of the nineteenth century. In a cave in Kirkdale in Yorkshire, eighty feet above the valley, under a floor covering of stalagmites, he found teeth and bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, deer, tigers (the teeth of which were “larger than those of the largest lion or Bengal tiger”), bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, hares, rabbits, as well as bones of ravens, pigeons, larks, snipe, and ducks. Many of the animals had died “before the first set, or milk teeth, had been shed.”

  Certain scholars prior to Buckland had their own explanation for the provenience of elephant bones in the soil of England, and to them Buckland referred: “[The idea] which long prevailed, and was considered satisfactory by the antiquaries [archaeologists] of the last century, was, that they were the remains of elephants imported by the Roman armies. This idea is also refuted: First, by the anatomical facts of their belonging to an extinct species of this genus; second, by their being usually accompanied by the bones of rhinoceros and hippopotamus, animals which could never have been attached to Roman armies; thirdly, by their being found dispersed over Siberia and North America, in equal or even greater abundance than in those parts of Europe which were subjected to the Roman power.”12

  It appeared that hippopotamus and reindeer and bison lived side by side at Kirkdale; hippopotamus, reindeer, and mammoth pastured together at Brentford near London.13 Reindeer and grizzly bear lived with the hippopotamus at Cefn in Wales. Lemming and reindeer bones were found together with bones of the cave lion and hyena at Bleadon in Somerset.14 Hippopotamus, bison, and musk sheep were found together with worked flint in the gravels of the Thames Valley.15 The remains of reindeer lay with the bones of mammoth and rhinoceros in the cave of Breugue in France, in the same red clay, encased by the same stalagmites.16 At Arcy, France, also in a cave, bones of the hippopotamus were found with bones of the reindeer, and with them a worked flint.17

  According to the prophecy of Isaiah (11:6), in messianic times to come the lion and the calf would pasture together. But even prophetic vision has not conceived of a reindeer from snow-covered Lapland and a hippopotamus from the tropical Congo River living together on the British Isles or in France. Yet they did leave their bones in the same mud of the same caves, together with bones of other animals, in the strangest assortments.

  These animal bones were found in gravel and clay to which Buckland gave the name of “diluvium”.

  Buckland was concerned “to establish two important facts, first, that there has been a recent and general inundation of the globe; and, second, that the animals whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high north latitudes.” The presence of tropical animals in northern Europe “cannot be solved by supposing them to migrate periodically … for in the case of crocodiles and tortoises extensive emigration is almost impossible, and not less so to such an unwieldy animal as the hippopotamus when out of the water.” But how could they live in the cold of northern Europe? Buckland says: “It is equally difficult to imagine that they could have passed their winters in lakes or rivers frozen up with ice.” If cold-blooded land animals are unable to hide themselves in the ground over the winter, in icy climates their blood would freeze solid: they lack, the ability to regulate the temperature of their bodies. Like Cuvier, Buckland was “nearly certain that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly.”18

  Of the time the catastrophe occurred, which covered with mud and pebbles the bones in the Kirkdale cave, Buckland wrote: “From the limited quantity of postdiluvian stalactite, as well as from the undecayed condition of the bones,” one must deduce that “the time elapsed since the introduction of the diluvial mud has not been of excessive length.” The bones were not yet fossilized; their organic matter was not yet replaced by minerals. Buckland thought that the time elapsed since a diluvial catastrophe could not have exceeded five or six thousand years, the figure adopted also by De Luc, Dolomieu, and Cuvier, each of whom presented his own reasons.

  Then the illustrious geologist added these words: “What [the] cause was, whether a change in the inclination in the earth’s axis, or the near approach of a comet, or any other cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the present memoir.”

  The Aquatic Graveyards

  The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as one of the oldest strata with signs of extinct life in it. No animal life higher than fish is found there. Whatever the age of this formation, it carries the testimony and “a wonderful record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole tribes.”19

  In the late thirties of the last century Hugh Miller made the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland the special subject of his investigations. He observed: “The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.”20 Ben Nevis in the Grampian Mountains is the highest peak in Great Britain, 4406 feet high. The stratum of the Old Red Sandstone is twice as thick.

  This formation presents the spectacle of an upheaval immobilized at a particular moment and petrified forever. Hugh Miller wrote:

  “The first scene in [Shakespeare’s] The Tempest opens amid the confusion and turmoil of the hurricane – amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. ... The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall and Gamrie, and many a thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion.” Miller found that the hardest masses in the stratum – “porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel, – are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms. ... And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a space… and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories’ height in thickness.”21

  In the red sandstone an abundant aquatic fauna is embedded. The animals are in disturbed positions. At the period of the past when these formations were composed, “some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent around to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys22 shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites [any fossil fish] on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total. ...”23

  What agency of destruction could have accounted for “innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent [being] annihilated at once?” “Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death,” wrote Miller.24

  The ravages of no disease, however viru
lent, could explain some of the phenomena of this arena of death. Rarely does disease fall equally on many different genera at once, and never does it strike with instantaneous suddenness; yet in the ruins of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera and many species were involved; and so suddenly did the agency perform its work that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of surprise and terror.

  The area of the Old Red Sandstone investigated by Miller comprises one half of Scotland, from Loch Ness to the land’s northern extremity and beyond to the Orkney Islands in the north. “A thousand different localities” disclose the same scene of destruction.

  An identical picture can be found in many other places all around the world, in similar and dissimilar formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern Italy, Buckland wrote: “The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly. ... The skeletons of these fish lie parallel to the laminae of the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always entire, and closely packed on one another. ... All these fishes must have died suddenly ... and have been speedily buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course of deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have even preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain that they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had taken place.”25

  The same author wrote about the fish deposits in the area of the Harz Mountains in Germany: “Another celebrated deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate surrounding the Harz. Many of the fishes of this slate at Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted attitude, which has often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death. ... As these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage immediately succeeding death, it follows that they were buried before putrefaction had commenced, and apparently in the same bituminous mud, the influx of which had caused their destruction.”26